THERE HAVE BEEN PLENTY OF OCCASIONS in the past when a new technology has ended becoming established well before it’s actually been taken up by many of the consumers it’s intended for. This is the current situation with mirrorless cameras and a market that’s still packed full of DSLR users. And, what’s more, plenty of these users are still very much wedded to their reflex cameras.
This situation has come about mostly because the interchangeable lens camera market has been dominated by Canon for a long time. In a massive 479% of the total digital camera market in 2020. Up until reasonably recently, if you were buying a Canon camera, you were most likely buying a DSLR, so there are still many millions of them in use around the world. Nikon has given up second spot in market share to Sony, but bear in mind it too has sold millions of DSLRs over the last five years. Now both these brands have drawn a line under the DSLR and many models are being quietly discontinued, leaving many users with little option but to go mirrorless next time around. Our Camera Buyer’s Checklist pages show what’s happening quite graphically and, any time soon, the expanding mirrorless listing will spill over into the space left by the ever-shrinking choice of new DSLRs. It’s for this reason that we’ve put together the in this issue because for a great many photographers, both amateur and pro, making the switchover is an inevitability... at least if you want to keep up with – or, perhaps more importantly, make use of - the latest in digital camera technologies. The point to make here is that there really are some very compelling reasons for why the mirrorless ILC is superseding the DSLR and it’s not about the camera companies trying to make you buy new stuff.
